Thursday, October 9, 2014

I came to this country (USA) when I was 5 years old. My father was a dentist and my mother, who is still alive, is a philosopher. My father was one of the most practical people on earth - Korean dentists are the most practical people on earth.

My mother, on the other hand as a philosopher, interested me at an early age to the writings and work and life of Martin Luther King. She would always say to us I get the dad be practical thing but you know you have got to live your life as if for eternity. So she always filled our head with the best ideas and taught us that we had a responsibility to the world. We left a wore-torn country, my parents were both refugees from the war; we were one of the very very fortunate Korean families to have opportunities with education, so she always said you have a responsibility to the rest of the world

So for most of my adult life I spent time in places like Haiti, and Peru in the prisons of Siberia , in Africa trying to provide healthcare. A very close friend and colleague of mine, Paul Farmer and I along with other friends founded an organisation called Partners in Health.

At Partners In Health we lived by a very simple but difficult mission. We wanted to make a preferential option for the poor in Healthcare. Now what does that mean? For us, having had this amazing opportunity to study medicine and anthropology at some of the greatest institutions of highest education we felt that we had a deep responsibility to bring the best of medical science to the poorest people.

Now we started off fairly straightforward, we wanted to build clinics and bakeries and really pretty simple things then what we found out was that we could actually do a lot more - . we could actually treat HIV, we could treat tuberculosis and we could even treat drug resistant tuberculosis.

One year we stumbled upon a epidemic of Drug Resistant (DR) tuberculosis in the slums of Lima Peru, 50 cases in a town of 100000 people which counts as an outbreak of DR tuberculosis.. DR Tuberculosis is one of the most difficult diseases to treat even in the best hospitals., its 18-24 months of treatments and for 12 months you have to give patients an injection 6 days out of 7 every week, Very difficult. But what we found was that these 50 cases were infecting others and transmissions was continuing so we had no choice .

It turns out with tuberculosis that the only way to stop an epidemic is to treat those who are sick. So in other words from the human perspective is also te right thing to do from the public health perspective. Exactly the same problem we are facing today with Ebola.